Renaissance play quartos were about the size and shape of modern comic books and sold for sixpence.

Shakespeare's earliest published plays are referred to as folios or quartos according to the folding of the printed sheets and therefore the size of the book: folios being large, tall volumes and the quartos smaller and squarer.

And as the survey moves on from newspapers and polemical pamphlets to books, and from cheaper formats up to quartos and folios, the real names tend to disappear, except again under strictly limited provision, as in a dedication.

The essay format has a place in anthropology, I would say, even to the extent, as Don Gardner puts it, of ‘raising all of the biggest issues in social and philosophical thought in no more than ten quarto pages’.

Turner notes that in 1827 Newman composed a long essay of some sixty-six quarto pages addressed to his sisters.